On August 10, 1991, the cargo ship Vlora arrived in Bari, Italy, carrying around 20,000 Albanians fleeing political instability. This event marked a turning point in Italy’s migration history and is often seen as the moment the country began to perceive itself as a land of immigration. This article examines how recent graphic novels revisit and reframe the legacy of the Albanian migrant landings through visual storytelling, specifically focusing on Jepi Jora (Croma, Jepi Jora, Edizioni il Galeone, 2021) and L’invasione degli extraterroni (Hysi and Rapa, L’invasione degli Extraterroni. Un’autobiografia contro ogni confine, Becco Giallo, 2023). These works, produced within Southern Italian underground and activist networks, offer countermemories that challenge dominant national narratives of race, migration, and identity. Through critical visual and discourse analysis, combined with semi-structured interviews with artists and activists, this study investigates how these comics contribute to a renewed cultural memory of the Albanian crisis. It explores their role in resisting far-right political discourses and in shaping anti-racist activism, particularly in Southern Italy – a region increasingly positioned as a symbolic border of Europe. Drawing on postcolonial and intersectional frameworks, the article also engages with the racialisation of Southern Italians and migrants, notably through Hysi’s concept of the ‘extraterrone’, a hybrid identity confronting internal and external forms of exclusion. By situating these comics within broader debates in memory, migration, and transnational Italian studies, the article argues for the significance of graphic narratives as tools of political critique and historical reclamation into the contested imaginaries of Italian nationhood.

When I first visited Auschwitz, I visited it as an analyst, a cultural anthropologist accompanying a group of mostly Turkish, Turkish-German, Palestinian, and Palestinian-German youth participating in a federally and locally sponsored program meant to teach them about German history and to address their own antisemitism.1 I was there as an observer who could not help but be dislodged from my professional role and deeply moved by flakes of bone on the ground, and sites of intimate, state-sponsored murder: a shooting wall where guards killed at close range; the collection and smell of the human hair of the murdered a wheelbarrow used to carry human ashes produced after the gas chamber in crematoria. I was moved also by the tears and horror of these same youth, also traumatized by the remains of state-sponsored mass murder. Although the program that led them to Auschwitz was meant to teach them democracy, I wondered about the extent to which actually existing democracy, using its tool of democratization, has the adequate means, humility, or desire to transform itself or to start anew from the position of the mass murdered, the slave, or the noncitizen. What unexpected lessons would it then learn?